This disclosure relates generally to managing hierarchies of components in a product design environment and, more particularly, to filtering components out of a component hierarchy.
When designing and developing large integrated systems, circuits in particular, typically no one team of engineers is responsible for the entire design of the system. Instead, often teams of engineers are responsible for designs of components of the system, the overall design being the totality of the designs of the components provided by each team of engineers. As the system becomes more complex, more and more aspects of the system are divided into sub-components. A parent component may be broken up into multiple sub-components. This arrangement of components and sub-components may be related in a hierarchy that represents the overall system.
In some situations, component designers or design teams may wish to exclude certain components from an overall hierarchy. For example, some developers and designers may build reusable components that enable reductions in design and implementation times of a component hierarchy, but reuse of components may result in a conflict between differing versions of components within the component hierarchy that must be addressed. In another example, some developers may wish to remove certain sub-components such that they can focus on a particular subset of the component hierarchy.